Notes from an Apocalypse A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back - Mark O'Connell Page 0,15

was broadly in line with the prepper movement as a whole, but that she was just more honest about the extent to which she was driven as much by fantasy as by fear. There was, she said, undoubtedly an element of wish fulfillment, but in a way that was very different for her as a woman than it was for the majority of preppers who were men. Theirs was a fantasy of return to patriarchal norms, to a prefeminist dispensation that would be reestablished after the breakdown of civilization. But women, said Sarah, were already halfway to a dystopia. If she got raped tomorrow, for instance, she was by no means confident that she would go to the cops about it. I took her point to be that civilization was a relative concept to begin with, and that its collapse could seem to be more or less under way, depending on where you were standing.

And then she said something that I had not previously heard from any prepper. She was aware, she said, of a desire for final knowledge. To think that it might be to us, in our time, that the end of the story would be revealed: Was there not, she said, some comfort in that, some satisfaction?

I didn’t know how to answer the question. In an abstract sense, a cultural sense, I understood this as some part of the psychology of apocalypse. But as an individual, as a parent, I wanted the world to live on after me. This, I said, was at any rate my assumption about myself. But perhaps the reasons for my interest in the end of the world were more complicated than I was prepared to acknowledge. Perhaps my terrors and my desires were more intimately related than I knew.

3

LUXURY SURVIVAL

The week I traveled to the Black Hills of South Dakota to see the place from which humanity would supposedly be reborn after the coming tribulations, there happened to be a lot of talk about nuclear war. The UN had announced sanctions against North Korea, and North Korea had vowed to take physical action against such sanctions, and America, in the person of a president who was at that point vacationing at one of his many eponymous luxury golf resorts, advised that if they so much as lifted a finger they would be met with “fire and fury like the world has never seen.” According to The Wall Street Journal, analysts were trying to guess what would happen to the markets in the event of all-out nuclear war between the United States and North Korea. (The answer seemed to be that you would likely see some flattening of yield curves due to lower risk appetites, but that from a financial perspective a nuclear apocalypse wouldn’t exactly be the end of the world.)

The apocalypse was trending. The memes were dank with foreboding, and the presiding mood was one of half-ironic Cold War nostalgia mixed with sincere eschatological unease. It seemed as good a time as any to visit a place for sitting out the end times. My obsessive consumption of prepper videos had opened out onto a broader vista of apocalyptic preparedness, and to a lucrative niche of the real estate sector catering to individuals of means who wanted a place to retreat to when the shit truly hit the fan.

I’d made arrangements to meet with one Robert Vicino, a real estate impresario from San Diego who had lately acquired a vast tract of South Dakota ranch land. The property had once been an army munitions and maintenance facility, built during the Second World War for the storage and testing of bombs, and it contained 575 decommissioned weapons storage facilities, gigantic concrete and steel structures designed to withstand explosions of up to half a megaton. These Vicino intended to sell for twenty-five grand a pop to those Americans who cared to protect themselves and their families from a variety of possible end-time events—from nuclear war, certainly, but also from electromagnetic pulse attacks and gigantic solar flares and asteroid collisions and devastating outbreaks of viral contagion, and so on. He had set up shop in the Black Hills in the hope of drawing some customers from the multitude of bikers who had descended on South Dakota that week for the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally.

Vicino was among the most prominent and successful figures in the doomsday preparedness space, a real estate magnate for the end of days. His company specialized in the construction of massive